


you will be first against the wall

by orphan_account



Category: Glee
Genre: Blangst, Dysfunctional Family, Implied Incest, Incest, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-20
Updated: 2012-06-20
Packaged: 2017-11-08 05:02:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/439436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts like a children's bedtime story, written in various hues and tones of coloring pencils inside a custom-made diary, cover bruised with ink and paint and the various scars that numb and mark the life of a pre-teen: falling down from bikes or the scattered branches of the trees he attempted climbing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you will be first against the wall

**Author's Note:**

> Rating is t for homophobia, dysfunctional families, the sadie hawkins dance and all it implies, and incest subtext (but sadly no acting on it). Written for the 30-day writing challenge: beginning.

It starts like a children’s bedtime story, written in various hues and tones of coloring pencils inside a custom-made diary, cover bruised with ink and paint and the various scars that numb and mark the life of a pre-teen: falling down from bikes or the scattered branches of the trees he attempted climbing.

It starts like a modern-day fairytale just before Cooper completes ten years old, with a scribbled sentence that to unknowing eyes wouldn’t mean anything.  _He’ll have known me his entire life._

It starts with unblinking eyes, Cooper standing over the crib afraid to miss anything, afraid that missing a breath, a cry, would be adding to the lost days in his life, the days  _(weeks months_ years _)_ where he didn’t know Blaine.

+++

His parents are enchanted with his obsession for the tiny child: the way he cradles in bed next to his mother and never seems to have enough; the way creative writing becomes a way for him to talk and talk in slanted sentences about the new addition to his life; the way he seldom goes out to play anymore.

They have heard about many a case of unhappy families so that fondness doesn’t seem like a bad thing to them and their faces soften at the edges when they whisper around the sleeping brothers at naptime.

The first word Blaine ever utters should have been predictable.

_(Cooper’s smile at the sound, at the recognition of his name, slurred and dragged inside Blaine’s mouth, the sounds blurred together, is lost to his parents but not to the searching eyes of his brother.)_

+++

They move to a bigger house when Blaine turns five, rooms piled high and thin, story by story between the vast and wooden attic and the cold basement.

_(This is the first place Blaine will remember living in, as far as his memory can reach.)_

The backyard is almost a garden, a wondrous and eerie board for the stories Cooper tells his brother, relishing the easy smile he gets as payback and the way his naïve brother always seems to believe him.

Cooper is Blaine’s first  _(and only)_ friend, a story that goes unsaid, present only in the shifting of their parent’s eyes, from Cooper to Blaine and Blaine to Cooper, at first embarrassed but as time goes by anxious and frightful.

_(If they do realize Blaine is Cooper’s only friend, they say nothing. Then again, saying nothing is the norm in this new house where the secrets fill more space than the four inhabitants do.)_

+++

Cooper starts dating when he turns seventeen, a jumble in his memory of tangled limbs and filthy smiles, of messy hair do’s and throwing clothes off bodies, a bittersweet mishmash of names that sound foreign or old or too easy on his tongue, of getting drunk and getting high and getting off, always the same and always dull.

_(He watches Blaine grow up and grow apart with an intensity that would disturb spectators, were they any._

_He closes his eyes on his parents’ absence and he ends up alone in that crowded house.)_

+++

Cooper is twenty-two when it happens, the beginning like every other boy-meets-girl story, a young adult’s book crumpled and rough, flimsy industrial sheets of paper that part from the cover faster than you can read them.  _(But it doesn’t matter because they’re covered in secondhand clichés, torn and overused stories that can’t even, can’t ever be labeled as love.)_

He trips over his own feet and the drink he’s holding tilts on its axis and flips forward, down the front of the girl’s brown shirt.

He leaves with a new number on his phone and a name floating inside his mind, Anneliese.

_(He doesn’t listen to its lilt on his tongue; if he did, he’d have been surprised about how wrong it sounds.)_

This isn’t a beginning, in his head: he marks those like milestones on his calendar and since he was born he associates them with a certain smell, a certain color, an early form of synesthesia he never cared to erase.

The real beginning is the ring hidden at the bottom of a drawer and getting down on one knee, arms thrown around his neck and falling down, clichéd and tired, and finally the severing of ties, paper boxes in the backseat as he moves his things and leaves his past behind, says goodbye to  _mother and father and my scared little brother_  with a smile that blooms around his words like an early flower.

That day is the turning of a page, messy and blundering instead of the neat new chapter he would have hoped for, when Blaine turns his back on him and leaves the dinner table unprompted and on an empty stomach.

_(There’s a pungent, acrid taste in his mouth when he closes the door on his brother’s last words, empty sentences that sound like goodbye instead of congratulations.)_

+++

That day starts like the chatter and gossip of two housewives with too much time in their hands and not enough to think about, the bigotry of their lives barely hidden under their words when they discuss the latest case of divorce or adultery:  _but d’you think he is…?_

It feels like a beginning for all the wrong reasons when he closes her door for the last time and allows himself to delete that number from his phone.

He doesn’t think about what prompted this act, or the feeling of relief that washes over him with no inkling of guilt or empathy.

+++

_(At the beginning it feels like heartbreak in a horror movie, like the hero kneeling down next to the lifeless love interest as the whole theater sucks in a breath to cover their sobs.)_

+++

He’s called home by a crying voice over the phone

_(there was an accident, an accident with Blaine—)_

and white noise, white noise that drowns every sound and keeps buzzing in his ears along the drive home, fast on the highway and he doesn’t stop or turn his head away, doesn’t think until he has cold tiles under his knees and the sleeping face of his brother  _(and how much he has grown, how much Cooper has missed)_  before him.

His hands are torn over the sheets they fist and his face is bruised and wet and Cooper doesn’t go home.

_(He understands what happened by catching meaning between the words, by pausing to think about how they played the pronouns game, how they avoided both his eyes and the unconscious form on the rusty bed.)_

He’s holding Blaine’s hand when he wakes up.

He’s still holding it when Blaine wakes up.

+++

Blaine leaves the hospital after three days and comes home after a week.

_(Here’s how it happens: he calls Cooper in the middle of the night, a whisper barely higher than the wind:_  I can’t stay, I can’t stay here anymore _, and then the tears and the pleas and Cooper can imagine the silent dinners and hands balled tightly into fists and the judgmental words too loud, too clear behind closed doors._

_He comes in the morning after_  mother and father and their bigoted heavy words  _leave for work and they clean up the house of everything Blaine has, everything Blaine was, and stuff the car and leave.)_

This is the first time any beginning has felt like a new beginning.

He throws his little boy’s diary, torn and muddy and ink stains like blood soaking the sheets, down the highway through the open window.

+++

They sleep in the car, halfway between Lima and L.A.,

(halfway between the past and the future, halfway between madness and home.)

huddled together, Cooper on the backseat and Blaine on the fully reclined front seat.

Cooper wakes up with their breaths mingling and Blaine’s hand, still bandaged and bruised, is flexing around his arm, fingers curled and nested around his bicep.

_(In the beginning Cooper doesn’t allow himself to feel.)_

+++

The beginning for Blaine is the sunrise over the highway—the moment he allows himself to hope again.

He opens the window and reaches out,

_(throws out the words his parents etched on his skin, tattooed his innards with—)_

Throws out the cardigan  _mother and father and the weight on their shoulders_  gave him for thanksgiving the year before yesterday and the boat shoes he wore to visit  _aunt jenny and her dementia and the cobwebs inside the cupboards,_

_(throws out the past and the empty pressure on his gut, the late-night tears muffled under the pillow and the scars)_

breathes in,

_(again)_

finally.


End file.
